ABSTRACT
This chapter elucidates levels of participation, and provides an initial exploration of the lexical make-up of the teacher education corpus, comparing the face-to-face and online (blogs, chat, and discussion forums) data. In terms of community practices, mutual engagement is implied via participation and interactivity to show that there is engagement in the modes. Type token analysis and lexical density of face-to-face conversations and computer-mediated communication, including chat, discussion forums, and blogs, are also examined. Community of practice features are also explored in terms of the frequently occurring items from the teacher education corpus. The corpus-based results of frequency, keyword, and cluster comparisons with a number of existing corpora result in an examination of pronoun usage to display a joint enterprise. Mutual engagement emerges as affective (through the items like and feel and response tokens), evaluative (via stance and modality), narrative (reflective), and cognitive. The category of a shared repertoire is exemplified by the abundance of metalanguage found within the data. While the data provide evidence of community practices, interview and e-mail data are also examined to portray the student teachers’ perceptions.
